Royal Bank of Scotland's $1.7bn sale of 318 branches to Santander has gone titsup.
The Spanish bank pulled out, largely "because of problems over integrating the two banks' IT systems", The BBC reports.
The Telegraph has a teeny bit more detail, reporting a "series of IT problems that have resulted from a lack of compatibility …

Re: Another English pirate

Easy tiger were all skint at moment and regardless of the pros & cons of the euro there are few economists who suggest it would a good option to join at this moment.

As for BAE well the world situation means not every government can afford to upgrade their armaments and if a "firesale" did occur I can say I personally hope the technology remains within Europe rather than going to potentially less than friendly suitors?

Re: Another English pirate

@AC of limited vision: Just convert BAE into a "Too Big To Fail"-Bank, precisely what Jack Welsh did with GE, and the money spigot will never turn off!

The EU will not collapse, however it will evolve into a full-blown dictatorship - that is the price one must always pay for keeping an empire together.

Whatever collapses and popular upsets there may be on the way to full implementation of politicians and bankiers visions will just be used to "sell" the neccesary legislation. It is already prepared and filed, awaiting opportunity. In this the British are leading the way, probably 10 years ahead of Europe (both in "sinking" and "police state"). So, it is true that not much is gained for the brits by leaving. Others will gain more.

Re: Don't assume it's RBS's fault

I have to second you on that. I was around when Abbey was bought by Santander. Granted, Santander themselves were a lot easier to work with. Tell them what you needed done, and they would either grant authority to do so, or they'd let you know soon after. Abbey and their outsourcers on the other hand... oy vey.

So you want to buy us out? Let me show you our multi-headed, multi-directional hardware/software pride and joy - we've been growing it for years. What? You don't want "that thing" anywhere near your sensitive areas? Well, we're off then...

With Abbey, Bradford and Bingley and Alliance & Leicester, they pulled the data out of their respective systems, converted it to Santander format and imported it into their Spanish data centre. Some people had teething problems with their accounts, mine went through without any problems.

With a data migration, the bulk of the work is all upfront mapping the information between the two systems. It's relatively easy to output it all in a shareable format. The only issues that could arise are if the systems are so different that they don't have enough common fields to make it work. Although two banks shouldn't be significantly different in the data they hold unless one of them had made some very odd choices in the past.

Re: Huzzah

Re: Huzzah

I was off like a long dog as soon as I heard Santander were taking RBS over. If I had to suffer the inconvenience of changed account numbers and sort codes (I was informed that I wouldn't be keeping the RBS ones I'd had since 1980) I'd rather it was on my terms. I'd had dealings with Santander before when they took over Abey [National] and had no wish to repeat that dismal experience.

Moved in a painless transfer to Co-op - a bit boring, with not as much add-on functionality as RBS, at least initially (e.g. a decent phone App) - but, so far, reliable and owned by its customers. The latter is, to me, a big plus.

I was saddened to leave RBS (I joined when it was Williams and Glyn) as I had always found the high street banking side of things reliable, and the telephone banking staff invariably helpful, but the sell off of the branches was the last straw.

Re: Huzzah

Santander has, or at least had, a hilariously way of storing addresses. When my Abbey mortgage was absorbed into Santander I stopped receiving statements or any other mortgage related post. I inquired why this had happened and after numerous phone calls that ended with either being disconnected or being transferred between the same clueless departments, I found out that the address for correspondence had been set to Santander's offices in Milton Keynes. This is the default address when post is returned, and the reason it was being returned was because it had been addressed to "17 Frognal Road" rather than "17 Frognal". This was because Santander's data entry system refused to accept a street address that didn't have one of a limited range of suffixes. It appears that during the data migration, they had simply defaulted single name streets to a suffix of "Road".

Re: Huzzah

That seems a bit poor of the post office, who often have these tales of reuniting letters to recipients even with minimal address information.

They couldn't, with a seeming valid postcode deliver to an address that was in other respects the same but had the word Road after it?

Cue deliverer's reconstruction: "Hmm, I have a letter to be delivered and the postcode has led me to street called Frognal, but the address says 'Frognal Road'. Can't be the same place, better return it to the head office at the post office's expense and greater effort to myself."

> This all ends when we put the fucking banksters and the regulators in prison.

Sounds like the fairy godmother has been experimenting with the happy pills again.

This farce will actually end when the Euro is recognised as being a failed experiment, and countries return to being in control of their own monetary policies and exchange rates. Unfortunately with the EU now having received the Nobel peace prize in relation to services embracing democracy (hah, hah, hah!), it is far less likely to happen - and we've got years ahead of us whilst this banking crisis stumbles from one disaster to another.

Re: Don't you go hijacking this topic.

In a sense, in a sense. We have to keep on going because changing demands quantum tunnelling of the painful sort.

In reality, we are in the Economic Matrix, where Krugman types pretend that things are perfectly all right and the uncomfortable feeling of the unseen feeding tubes starting to run on empty is just a by-effect of the Good Hand of Wise Economic Planning.

Fairy tales of the extreme right

I recommend that you start on reading the history of Europe for the past 80 years or so. By those accounts there EU is not going anywhere and the euro certainly is not going anywhere.

Nigel Farage is not so important. The second he is off the stage everybody is going to forget him and his useless message.

What did happen to Royal Bank of Scotland is there own fault of greed and incompetent. There people how did run the bank should in reality never have been running the bank in the first place. In fact. This people should not run anything of any importance at all. Ever!

Re: @FredScummer

The Euro as a monetary union was not a failure. The fact that several governments cheated and hid their debts (like Greece did) to join the Euro is. The EU auditors have never been able to balance the books for Greece in the Euro's 12 year existence. That should've had alarm bells ringing for years. But no-one listened.

@2012-10-15T12:15

We didn't bail out Iceland. We (partially?) bailed out British depositors in Icelandic banks, and then demanded the Icelandic government pay us back (which I believe they are doing).

And we only contributed to the Irish bail out.

It was a tongue-in-cheek trolling. But if Scotland had been independent, then I'm sure the Scots would've carried a greater share of the costs than they've actually had to pay. (No doubt while muttering something about "oil revenues".)

Who's running your bank?

"RBS must realise it's just an IT biz with a banking licence."

ANYONE who wants to run a bank MUST realise they are running an IT business. There are a few new entrants in the last few years, and all the ones I've worked with haven't yet grasped the concept. There are some good Banking IT people in the Bank parts, and some reasonable techies in the parent parts, but the management philosophy in the parents groups is still not in the right lace to understand that the bank IS its IT.

You can still sell YOUR tins of beans without IT, you cannot give customers back THEIR cash! The public gets very upset when they can't get THEIR cash!

Re: Who's running your bank?

Re: Who's running your bank?

What "cash"? Last time I checked, all I have in my accounts are numbers - not even on paper, they did away with that years ago.

Fun Story: I lost a bit of money on my house, I also have a pension account. The bank send me one of those "pay or we harvest your childrens organs"-letters. I write back: "Fine. Kill the pension account, that will cover it with a generous margin, even after the tax rape". Bank calls me back: "Oh-dear, what would you like to pay per month Sir?".

Now I *certainly* will kill the pension accont - because it is obvious that the money is not there! The bank probably have set up a buffer-account for early repaymenents e.t.c. while the bulk of the investment is in a "Growth Enhanced Mediteranian Premium-rate Bond Trust"*) or something similar, market price maybe 20% of what is claimed on the statement. Cashing the pension take a chunk of their reserves, and paying the debt kills a revenue stream and the fucks probably securitised the overdraft already, so they have to buy back the bonds. A Hurt-Hurt situation - for them.

Re: Who's running your bank?

"Banks are an IT biz with a banking license"

Back in the day there used to be a company that essentially supplied a bank-in-a-box application for the IBM i-series.

Get banking license

Buy i-series

Install software

Add cash and branches.

For a number of lesser known banks that was *all* they needed.

Everything else was (effectively) *marketing*.

Any one who is familiar with the magazine "Money Facts" will know just how *alike* UK banks are when it comes to loans, accounts etc. I'd suggest *most* of the "difference" between them really is marketing and the particular ways they choose to screw their profit out of their target group.

Who Paying The Bill

The task of splitting off branches and accounts from RBS to Satander must have cost a fair few quid, any penalties heading Santanders way or will it be good old tax payer who picks up the bill. Nationalise the banks now and return good customers services. hell when we are at it, let natiionlise the energy industry and stop the consumer from being milked and ripped off by foreign companies owning them.

Re: Who Paying The Bill

Nationalising doesnt bring good customer service, just gives Unions and "Jobs for life" chums more bargaining power without having to produce anything for it as the taxpayer foots the (Leyland, British Aerospace, Rolls Royce Aero, Railways, Undergorund etc etc) bill for wages

Mikko Soirola, from IT integration specialist Liaison Technologies

In complex cases like this, integrating legacy systems can be a brutal task for even the most adept IT organisation, so walking away from the RBS deal might indeed be the right decision for Santander. However, deeper due diligence earlier on can quickly indicate the scale and complexity of the proposed integration between any organisation and assist the strategic decision-making process sooner, saving a lot of time and money.

That said, the growing ability to use cloud computing as a broker between highly disparate IT infrastructures is now making it possible to integrate IT where previously it was deemed impossible. This might be an example where traditional approaches to integration could have benefitted from fresh thinking.

Successful integration is also in the eye of the beholder – and RBS could have, and should have, ensured that its IT assets were implemented in ways that were more open to integration and change, which would have been to the benefit of both the seller and its shareholders. For any other potential suitor, the now very public issue on integration has had the added effect of substantially marking down the multi-billion dollar price tag that such a deal was originally deemed worth.

Hey genius...have you actually LOOKED at the regulations for using cloud solutions for sensitive financial data in the UK and the EU??? With advice such as yours, both banks can be quickly put out of business by the regulators so quickly that the lack of integration will not actually matter. There exist specialists in FinSvcs IT for a very good reason - we know the compliance issues. And you are obviously not one of us.

And I am a frequent commentator on this site, but posting as AC so that I don't sound like I am blowing my OWN horn in response. Instead, I blow my nose in the OP's general direction.

@Mikko Soirola

""That said, the growing ability to use cloud computing as a broker between highly disparate IT infrastructures is now making it possible to integrate IT where previously it was deemed impossible. This might be an example where traditional approaches to integration could have benefitted from fresh thinking.""

Sure, sure, the best way of integrating legacy stuff is to deploy a hybrid ESXi cloud on some (random) hosting company, and run MSDOS on a couple VMs that would take the complexity of having to understand anything away. That is for sure.

(Wait! why can not I bullshit too?)

What RBS should have done is learn how to leverage data and information to gain optimum operational business intelligence.